Solana Ecosystem Panorama
Solana Overview
Solana has emerged as one of the most handful smart contract platforms, competing to become a base layer for DeFi applications, with some of its projects gaining traction as its SOL token climbs to the top 7 by market capitalization. Solana is also one of the fastest growing smart contract platforms in Crypto.
Solana, created in 2017, incorporates a so-called Proof-of-History timing mechanism that facilitates its Proof-of-Stake protocol structure, which allows it to process more than 50,000 transactions per second, but also requires highly specialized hardware.
Solana’s key features
Solana’s highly performant blockchain is built using 8 major innovations highlighted below:
- Proof of History — a clock before consensus.
- Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance — a PoH-optimized version of PBFT.
- Turbine — a block propagation protocol.
- Gulfstream — a Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol.
- Sealevel — the world’s first parallel smart contracts run-time.
- Pipelining — a transaction processing unit for validation.
- Cloudbreak — a horizontally-scaled accounts database.
- Archivers — for distributed ledger storage.
The network is heavily backed by Sam Bankman Fried’s Alameda Research and FTX, with investments in ecosystem projects including Oxygen and Step Finance, while FTX directly founded Serum, one of Solana’s main DEXs.
The Solana crypto, or SOL, is the native token of the Solana network. By staking the coin, nodes on the Solana blockchain can hold the positions of either a validator or a delegator. Solana crypto also allows users to earn passive rewards through the delegated staking options the Solana network offers. There are already over 300 million SOL coins in circulation.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has exploded onto the scene and kicked off the multi-chain wars thanks to the relative ease of porting Ethereum applications onto it, backed by the unstoppable marketing machine of Binance.
Solana growth, on the other hand, isn’t as explosive. Since it isn’t EVM-compatible, applications need to be tailor-made for it. With that said, Solana aims to host decentralized apps that aren’t possible on other blockchains.
Summary
Solana is an interesting project especially with the incredibly high TPS. Low cost and high TPS is going to be necessary if we ever want to see mass adoption of crypto and Solana is working on a solution to this problem. The Solana ecosystem is now explosive with many DeFi apps and NFTs. But it is just a start for the Solana chain. This platform still has an enormous chance to boom up and become a legend in the cryptocurrency field.
Source: The Defiant, Binance research
